I don’t know what hurt more, the last words she spoke to me, “you failed, and your friend is next” or the spear she had thrown into my chest. She was right, I had failed, and not only was Eli next, but after him EVERYONE was next, Kat, Vivian, even her prick of a husband, not to mention everyone else on board. maybe if I had put it together a few minutes earlier I could have stopped her, hell, I might have even survived this whole mess. Knowing that did hurt a lot, on the other hand that spear really fucking hurt. I nearly put them down as a tie until I finally hit the ground, and the 30-foot fall won, the forgotten dark horse in this unfortunate race.

  When one finds themselves in a bad situation, sometimes all that is missing is the proper information, which once they have, they can really appreciate just how well and truly screwed they are.

  THE EXIT INTERVIEW

  Everything was fuzzy, thoughts just barely making it to the surface only to slip away like oil on the ocean water’s troubled surface. The fact that I was sitting slowly solidified, followed by remembering which way was up. Pain was next, nothing sharp, only a dull ache encompassing my whole body. A robed figure stood opposite a simple metal table in front of me, the hood drawn over, obscuring most features but whisps of a white beard poking through. Where am I? I thought, but the answer slipped my mind immediately, never finding purchase in the haze of my mind. Looking about no features lent me a hint, a nondescript small metal room with no windows is where I found myself.

  “You still seem a little disoriented there, friend. No need to rush, take a moment and gather yourself.” The cloaked figure said in a voice like the groaning of an old oak tree, deep and strong. Taking his advice, I sat for several minutes trying to sift through my thoughts for something tangible. Something was missing, I realized. I thought for several minutes on what was lost when one word solidified, and I grasped hold of it. Death. That’s right, I died, and the memories started coming, the woman, the spear, the fall… the failure. Tears started to form at that last one, but that word had another meaning I realized. Death, not just that I died, but also who was there. Thinking that death personified stood in front of me, while strange, was assuredly not the strangest as of late. I raised my eyes and peered into the hood.

  “Looks like you are gathering your thoughts, which is good as I have a few questions for you” the hooded specter declared. He then pulled back his hood to reveal an older man, perhaps in his late 60’s with white hair combed into a simple coif and a long beard of the same snow white going down almost to his chest. He pulled a chair opposite of me out and sat down, looking intently at me with his pale blue, nearly silver eyes. “I need to know what happened on that ship.”

  Chapter 1

  10 Days earlier

  I don’t know what woke me up, but there was a moment of confusion, looking up at the stars with an odd half-formed thought still in my head until I remembered where I was. I must have fallen asleep up here while reading. Man, a day in the sun just really drains you, doesn’t it? I thought to myself as I shifted my stiff body around, preparing to get up.

  I know reading isn’t how most people would spend their time on a cruise liner, but I had gotten tired of eating to the point of discomfort around day four, there were no shows planned tonight, and I didn’t particularly enjoy the nightlife or drinking. There were only about five days left of our original fifteen until we were back in San Francisco for the flight home and on to the next step of my life.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, the name is Zeke, I lived most of my life around Arizona with my family until I left for school. I have always loved space and the stars, the idea that there are new things just beyond what we can see just waiting to be discovered always excited me. Once upon a time I aspired to go work for NASA and be a forerunner of exploration in the world until life hit me and closed off that path for me. I worked as a planetarium guide for most of my time at school to pay my way. My relationship with my parents is great, my two sisters show they care in their own special way, always introducing a new series or book that they’ve latched onto for me to enjoy. I was currently reading a hardcover copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring gifted to me by my oldest sister.

  I would consider my life to be mundane, I have several hobbies which I enjoy and had a good group of friends at school with whom I would play all sorts of games with. We would play a new board game nearly every week and over the past two years had become somewhat close. My anxiety about graduating almost had me deferring again and taking an extra semester, but we were all going to be going our separate ways soon enough and I had already taken a couple of years off from school earlier.

  I had gotten my astronomy degree despite my two-year break, thankfully school allows deferrals depending on the circumstances and to celebrate, my parents had gotten me a Hawaiian cruise. It had been fun, but the constant thinking about what the rest of my life was going to be like kept me up most nights. I had offers from a few schools and planetariums, I kind of knew my grades weren’t good enough to be considered for NASA like I had wanted and hadn’t even applied for the internship program. That gnawed at me a little bit, I just kept thinking, what do I really have to offer? Begrudgingly, I accepted that making small observations and teaching would likely be my addition to exploring and expanding our understanding of the universe.

  The ship was the Adda, a Concordia-class ship, and while it was not the largest of these cruise liners, it was over a thousand feet long and had room for several thousand people on board. I had tried to see as much as possible of the ship during my time aboard, but there was just too much. With over a dozen bars and clubs and nearly twenty restaurants, it really felt like being aboard a floating city.

  The cruise had just finished its port in Hawaii and had left earlier today for San Francisco, I had eaten a bit too much and was relaxing on one of the highest decks on a lounge chair reading last evening when I must have fallen asleep. With a quick check of my watch, it was just about 1 in the morning, hmm, I should head back to my cabin and get some sleep I thought despite just waking up. Looking around it appeared as though I was the only one in the atrium. The lounge chair was very comfortable, and I lay for another minute, then another just looking at the stars when an odd thought occurred to me. Where is the north star? My love of space and astronomy made me look for the big dipper and I eventually saw the north star, Polaris, at the rear of the ship.

  We’re headed south, maybe south-west? I pondered on our direction for a moment, entertaining thoughts as to what was going on as I stood up to the railing and looked around a little more attentively. After a moment I could see a few lights on and flashing at the command tower for the ship, not unusual as there would be crew all around the ship even at this late hour. Most everyone else would be in bed, with a scant few still milling about the bars and casinos a few floors down. Looking out on the top deck I could only see a single person out walking their dog. That’s odd, I haven’t seen any dogs out on this cruise. I didn’t think they were allowed. I thought as I watched the man walk along the deck by the pool.

  The man and his dog slowly meandered around the deck before they headed into one of the stairwells nearer the front of the ship. The dog was such an oddity that my mind began trying to figure out why a dog would be on the cruise. The fact that we were headed in the wrong direction was also curious, making me wonder if someone had been reported missing, forcing the ship to turn around and dogs sent out to find them. It was such an odd thought but it seemed to be the most likely scenario so I decided to head to my bunk and accept that news would come tomorrow morning as to what was going on and whether there would be a free additional day to my vacation.

  My nap had been in the upper solarium, giving a free view of the sky through an intricately gilded dome of glass and steel, with plants all around and quiet compared to the rest of the ship where a steady thrum of conversation or music was a constant din. Turning towards the winding set of stairs headed to the lower level with an artificial raised pond and water feature I could see the large double doors leading to the rest of the ship and began heading down them when the double doors opened revealing a man wearing what appeared to be a black hoodie with reflective bands around the torso and arms with a dog sliding through the door right behind him. Another one of those search teams? How many of them can there be? I thought. The man looked around for a moment, not noticing me above, and proceeded to pull out a book and some kind of metal can from his hoodie pocket. After glancing at the book, he bent down and began hunch walking and spraying a line of fluorescent green paint along the floor, going towards the center of the room. Confused, I prepared to speak up to the man asking what he was doing, but before even the sound left my lips the dog stiffened and turned its whole body towards me. The dog hardly moved a muscle for a single frozen breath until the man spoke something too quietly for me to hear to the dog and it fired forward like a bullet, straight towards me.

  Panic coursed through me in a single heartbeat, adrenaline already flooding my arms and legs as well as clouding my thoughts. Holding back the gut feeling to scream I turned up the stairs and ran back to the assembled furniture, trying to get anything in between me and the speeding dog, although looking at this thing running at me, I quickly realized this wasn’t a small animal, its shoulders reached the lip of the raised pond, the damn thing was probably a little over two, maybe even two and a half feet tall. Its breath was steamy coming out of its mouth, despite the balmy temperature and the fur was dark and sleek as it blurred towards me. Standing behind the same lounger from before I yelled to the man “Call off your damn dog!” but my attention was focused entirely on the hound. The dog ran, fast as it’s legs could propel it, making a beeline straight for me, it didn’t even pause at the lounge chair, opting instead to jump straight over it, open mouth snarling as it went to attack.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I dove to the left, narrowly avoiding the beast and its rows of sharpened teeth and falling ungracefully to a shoulder. Luckily, the diving animal slammed into the back of a nearby sun chair, and I could hear it fall with a clatter of pipes and plastic behind me. I scrambled to my feet as fast as I could and ran for the stairs only to see the man from earlier climbing the stairway, no longer with the can but rather a long knife. Oh, God! There’s some psychopath on board this ship, and he’s going to kill me. My panicked mind screamed as I turned to run perpendicular to the knife wielding man and his dog behind me. After a single lunge I saw in my peripheral the dog run, skittering by where I had been a second previously. I turned to face the man, with his dog now beside him, growling at me.

  “Back the hell off!” I yelled at the man, who I now realized was a shorter, maybe five-foot Hispanic man with gaunt features, only made sharper by the shadows of his hood with a close-cut hairstyle, almost a buzz-cut. “What do you want with me, you crazy little shit?” I said, squaring against him and the growling dog beside him, pointing with my left while still holding my book in my right.

  “My friends just don’t want anyone roaming about right now, so if you tell me your room number my Bella and I can escort you to your room without any… unpleasantness” he replied in an admittedly deeper voice than I thought he would have tinged with a slight Mexican accent while motioning to the hound beside him.

  I glared at him, my mind racing “what the hell? Are there more of these guys and are they taking over the cruise, are they robbing it or holding everyone hostage? Just what is going on here?” The thought did cross my mind of listening to the creepy guy with a knife and large dog, let them take me to my room and just do whatever they want to the ship, so I don’t get involved or hurt, all those teeth did make a compelling argument. But there was just a little glint in the man’s eye and the way his mouth curved into a wicked little smirk at one end that told me he wanted to hurt me; he was loving this. “Yeah, back the fuck off Quasimodo and I’ll go to my room myself, I’m not telling you jack.” I said, mustering my courage and trying not to let the fear in my voice show.

  The sly grin of his turned to a full smile as he began drawing back the sleeve of his left arm and he said, “I gave you a chance, joto.”

  I was readying myself for him or his hound to lunge at me, when to my surprise he stuck out his left arm, showing an impressive array of scars and old tattoos and drew his knife across the middle of his forearm, leaving a lengthy but shallow cut across it. Blood flowed from the wound, a lot of blood for such a shallow cut, maybe a pint of blood flowed quickly out of his cut and poured onto the ground before the bleeding slowed to a small beading nearly as quickly as it began, still leaving a lengthy cut on his arm. I nearly gagged at the sight. He muttered something under his breath as the blood fell to the ground and once it hit, the blood steamed instantly, not leaving so much as a drop on the actual tiled floor. What just happened? I wondered as I noticed the dog started to grow. Not that the dog was raising up, or its hackles were making it seem bigger, over the space of a few seconds the damned thing grew until it was the size of a Great Dane, at probably three and a half feet the creepy man could probably have ridden the thing.

  “Sick him.” The man commanded and the enlarged beast bolted towards me in a lunge. The panic rising in me, pushing me back, pushing me to run, to be anywhere but in the way of this thing was temporarily forgotten as I jabbed forward, pushing the spine of my book into the beasts’ mouth, preventing it from tearing me apart with the thankfully hardcover book. The weight and momentum of the lunge pushed me onto my back, and I landed with a grunt onto the hard tile, holding up the snarling dog with the book in my right hand inside its mouth and my left hand on its chest. It began scratching at me with its claws and trying to gnash its teeth through the book, I quickly got scratched a few times and my right hand began burning. Curling up my legs I was able to brace them on the lower chest and stomach of the dog on top of me and with all the strength I had, pushing from the solid floor as a backing I pushed the dog away from me in a sudden violent jerk.

  I have never been the most athletic person, and my build would be considered wiry, but I have always been tall, nearing six foot four. I hadn’t been in any sort of fight for nearly three years, not since a drunken brawl alongside my best friend Alexander, But I did go to the gym regularly and used exercise to blank my mind when I was overwhelmed at school. All this is primarily to say that I wasn’t just some pushover and when I got grip on the coarse fur of the roughly one hundred forty-pound beast with my cheap loafers I hefted it bodily into the air and away from me. I saw the animal go up and away, crashing into the man who stood to watch the attack and then both went down. I heard a yelp and several muffled *whumps* of impact as I dragged myself to my feet as quickly as I could, grimacing when my right hand flared in pain as I dropped the thoroughly destroyed and smoldering book. Wait, smoldering? As I looked at the book which had popped with smoke and had started to burn on one corner as it landed and I saw my lobster-red fingers, like I had dipped them in boiling water.

  I have to move. I told myself as I looked up and saw the piled heap at the bottom of the stairs. Walking carefully down the stairs and taking stock of a few small cuts on my arms and thighs I watched the fallen man and dog carefully. I could hear a hissing, whining noise, every other breath and as I approached the mess at the bottom of the stairs. I could make out the man, lying unconscious under the twitching dog, its own chest looking oddly shaped as the hissing noise came out of its mouth. I should run, I should run and hide and wait for whatever is happening to resolve itself without me the panic said, but rationality said he said he had friends, there are more of them on this ship, if I just run in a panic, I’m just going to get myself killed. Those two double doors from earlier looked very enticing, but instead I stopped and looked at what I had done. The fall must have broken the beast’s back, and some of its ribcage jutted unnaturally to one side.

  I should put it out of its misery I thought, not wanting to watch it struggle for breath despite it nearly killing me moments before. At least there’s no blood, I can hardly stand the sight of blood anymore.

  I wasn’t keen on killing the injured animal, but the burning from my hand certainly helped make the decision easier as I walked to the front of the hissing, wheezing beast and looked it in the eyes. Rage, pure unbridled frenzied rage was in those eyes, this thing was undoubtedly trying to kill me earlier and it wouldn’t have hesitated in the slightest. I lifted my leg and brought my foot down on its throat with a resounding *crunch* as the hound died. A moment later, the whole dog began steaming, and dissipated entirely over the next thirty seconds or so.

  “That really just happened, didn’t it?” I said aloud to the unconscious man, staring dumbfounded at the haze rapidly dispersing from the now-missing dog.

  The man began stirring so I quickly looked around and spotted the knife he had held a few feet away and picked it up before he fully came to. “Oh, Dios mio” he muttered before his eyes focused on me brandishing his own knife at him. His eyes narrowed and a frown deepened as he processed what he saw.

  “Just what the hell is going on here?” I asked the man who groaned, sitting up a little straighter “and what the hell was that thing?”.

  He made like he was going to push himself up but fumbled and plopped with his back against the stairs, propping him up, the whole time looking and frowning at me with the recovered blade. “It would be a waste to bother explaining anything to you, me and my group have already taken the ship, you might as well go back to your room and just wait it out” he said before grunting and shifting a little to one side as though in pain.

  Brandishing the knife, a little bit to encourage him I threatened “What was that dog? How did it disappear?”

  After a few shaky breaths he said, “that was my Bella, my familiar, she’ll be back here soon.”. I approached a step closer, watching him intently, feeling like he was trying to trick me somehow, or that he was playing at being more hurt than he really was.

  “How did you make it grow like that?” I asked, staring at the man, noticing something odd.

  “I just gave her some power, it’s all she needs” I hardly even heard what he said as the odd feelings I had crystallized into a single thought and with a moments verification of watching where the small man was looking just behind me and to my left, I spun and stabbed forward, catching the lunging dog right in the chest with its owner’s dagger. I was still bowled backwards but by the time I hit the ground the weight was already disappearing into the same smoke from earlier. What was I thinking earlier? I thought, thankful that I had noticed the color slowly leaving the man’s face and seeing how when he sat against the stairs he had hidden his left arm behind his body. And just before his eyes got that same dangerous glint as before I had spotted the faint wisps of smoke from behind him and figured, or at least guessed what he was planning.

  I would think I was crazy any other time for thinking that the guy was bringing the dog back behind me, but somehow, I was right. Why would I think that? I wondered as the much smaller dog now finished dissipating into smoke on top of me. It couldn’t have weighed more than 40 pounds or so that time I realized as I got up and looked to the man, who was slumped over to his side, paler than ever. Inching towards him, knife in hand, I realized that now was my time for some answers.

  As I looked closer at the man, I began to see the tattoos on his arm and face, showing in stark contrast with his now pale complexion. Tear drops under his left eye and a faded clown under the scars on his arm. His hoodie seemed to be one they had for sale at the port of entry in Hawaii, with the logo of the cruise liner emblazoned on the breast of it, with denim jeans and his black boots seemed to almost be platforms, giving him an extra inch or two of height. He would have been cooking in such an outfit in this weather normally. I cautiously gave him a little kick to the side to try and rouse him, but he just slumped over to his side. My heart lurched and I moved quickly to check the man’s breathing, worried he had bled to death doing whatever it was he had been doing. Leaning down I checked the man’s breath and felt a soft exhale on my hand. Now that the adrenaline was slowly dissipating, a bone-deep fatigue set in immediately and my earlier dinner of shrimp and steak threatened to come back up. Taking a deep breath and wiping my face I began to shake the man, attempting to rouse him to consciousness, I needed answers.